Yup, I'm a Genre Whore

*For the record, I will never shit on your choice of reading. Whether you read the Times Best Seller list or supermarket Harlequins, I fully support your reading choices. *

I'm a big reader. I will pick up and try just about anything once. And I have a wide, WIDE, reading range. Yes, I have a collection of specific children's books I use my children as an excuse for. *cough* Yes, I own a hefty collection of books for a two bedroom apartment. (Five overflowing bookcases, a few boxes, board book bins, and random stacks but who is counting) Between the Writer (moi) and the Husband (book a day man) we still frequent the library, used book stores, and regular bookstores to supply our habit. I have worked in bookstores for nearly a decade now, so the 'pantry' is always stocked. There are books on the kitchen table, books by the bed, even a wooden picnic basket chalk full of picture books in the bathroom to read to the boys for potty training. We are obsessed with books in this house and proud of it.
Between the Harry Potters and Jim Butchers is a healthy stack of Kresley Cole and Larissa Ione, James and the Giant Peach is comfortable nestled between Memoirs of a Geisha and The Autobiography of Mae West. To put it mildly, our reading tastes are eclectic. Though the hubby will swear in as a Sci -fi man, he will read just about anything with enough convincing/whining on my part.

Wearing my coveted Shaun of the Dead pin!

I don't need any convincing. But people get caught up on genre. I have hocked books at several different bookstores now, but working in used book stores, in that intimate setting they provide, has revealed the inner workings of the reader. People get caught up on genre all the time. I'm not sure when the change happened. I mean when I step back and see the same people who revere the work of Ray Bradbury and Orson Welles turn around and sneer at modern sci-fi, really? You know these two gentlemen wrote fantastic sci-fi and fantasy right? It's the label issue of the matter. We must fit everything into a box, though the box doesn't always fit. If I tried to put 1984 in the same box as Storm from the Shadows by David Weber, people get up in arms. No, 1984 is a classic piece of fiction!

Well, what about putting Dracula in the same box as World War Z. Both are horror right? Surprisingly not as many people get upset about that one, though Dracula is older and more classic than 1984.

Labels, they boggle the mind. Then you have the 'genre breaking' phenomenons, I'll use Hunger Games because Twilight makes me rant for whole other reasons.

What some people may or may not realize, Hunger Games was not Collins's first rodeo. She has this whole other series , a children's fantasy series, moderately successful itself. But in the balls and glory of the Games, which everyone and their mother read, people seemed to forget Suzanne Collins as a YA/Children's Fantasy author. It was a box, a nice, lovely box more and more people are poking their nose into. Why the felt the need to pry her out of the box is troubling. On my personal copy of the Hunger Games there is not a label for YA fiction anywhere on the cover or the copyright page. Your only indicator is Scholastic publishing, which is primarily a children's publisher.  It's still marketed in the Young Adult section, but why rid it of labels? Why not celebrate the labels? It's not a Genre breaking YA novel, it is a YA novel.

In truth, YA as a genre has lots of amazing offerings. I, myself, hope to join the ranks when I publish my book, because I am okay with this label. I'm also okay with labels like Fantasy and Science Fiction. My serial blog is Science Fiction, but the themes I'm exploring are just as heavy as any "fiction" piece.
It is thanks to writer's like Rowling, Collins, and even Meyers, I do not have the great fear of being nothing but a niche writer.

Now as a reader, I love genres, I love exploring different genres, sampling all the pies. I will proudly tell all I read smut, it's fun, relaxing, and it makes me giggle. I read fantasy, YA, sci-fi, mysteries, steam punk, biographies, horror, thrillers, graphic novels, comics, etc, so on and so forth. If it interests me, I'll read it. I believe everyone needs a healthy dose of fantastical fiction in their lives, even if it has to be sneaky. I believe it's a slap worthy offense to openly sneer at another person's reading choice. Who made you the literary police? I believe a well read man is sexy. I will stop whatever it is I'm doing if my child crawls into my lap with a book. Because books have power. I will remember the characters and plot of a book long after I've read it, I will go back and read many I love again. They inspire, they fuel imagination, and they survive, no matter what form they take, be it paper or digital. For me, genre is not a weighted word. I long ago decided books fell into two categories, Fiction and Non-Fiction. Genre is not a box I judge a book's quality by, I let the book speak for itself.

Genre is just an adjective.

I have no idea what I'm doing; Serial Blogging

Back in February, I stumbled on an old idea.

It's a very old idea, but the Idea came from how writers lived once upon a time. The writer I'm mostly thinking of is Charles Dickens. Dickens made his living as a writer, which even in his day was not the easiest of tasks and on top of that, Dickens had a pretty sizable family he supported with that writing to boot. How did he do it? I mean he was a popular author at the time, but pumping out those massive novels took time, so how did he support himself in between. The answer: many of his novels were released as serials, weekly or monthly installments rather than a whole book at once.

I thought that idea was fantastic, so I began formulating my own idea, and modernizing it. An online blog would be the perfect place to do this. After a month of planning and designing, I officially began the site towards the end of March. After five weeks, rolling out about a chapter a week, the writing is flowing but the interest is creeping along. I did not have high expectations. I am pleased with the steadily rising number of hits I do have, but...

There were two painfully large differences between my serial blog and Charles Dickens serials.  The first is money. I also attempt to support a family, and I do not get paid for the many hours I pump into this science fiction blog, nor do I know how to go about making money off it. Perhaps if I had an audience, I could garner funds, but this is also something I don't have a clue how to do.

The Militant Baker, http://www.themilitantbaker.com/ is an extremely popular blogger who not only has thousands of hits, but features an add feed on her site which is awesome and I as yet have no idea how to do. Even if I wanted to do something similar, how does one create a blogging audience? So far the only network I have attempted to use in expanding the site's audience is Facebook, which comes with it's own set of limitations. But it is where I am established in my own little community of friends and writers. How to go about branching out from there? Is it the people you know or the sites you post on? Is it just a matter of the right person stumbling across it and passing it along?

I feel another research project coming on...

“Didn’t you get tested?” A Rant, A Cry, A Hope

“Didn’t you get tested?”

There are so many things I could say about this article. As a mother whose son has been labeled Development Delayed, I actually broke down in tears reading it.
Whether you agree with genetic pre-screening or not, this speaks to a much darker issue in our society. I have often asked myself if I could terminate a pregnancy if I knew ahead of time my child would have down syndrome. To my knowledge there is still no test to screen for autism, since most forms of autism do not clearly manifest until the child is over a year old. I am a strong supporter of reproductive choice and rights, so it comes down to personal choice. For my answer, no I couldn't do it, I would have the child and shower it will all the love I do my other two children.
But what really bothers me about the whole issue, is

"Why has it become so agonizing to bring a down syndrome child into this world?"

We treat down syndrome like it's something shameful of, to pity the parents who have been "burdened" with raising mentally handicap children. To that knee jerk response I say "What the Fuck, society?" Why don't you put all that judgmental b.s. into improving the quality of life for all people with mental handicaps. People with D.S. or Autism are still people. If you judge these people based on how they were born, or their parents for "bringing them into this world", then you have just quantified a human life, their life is worth less than a 'normal' person.
Genetic perfection through elimination. Remember that Holocaust thing. Whoa, now,that's a little extreme, right? Perhaps, but remember, Hitler's plan was not to simply eliminate the Jewish people, they were just a part of the target population. He wanted to eliminate everyone he considered imperfect, which included physical and mental handicaps. He considered these people less than human and killed millions upon millions of people to achieve Genetic Perfection.

Fuck genetic perfection. Hey science, I know you are gung ho about solving these problems before they happen but this is what I want to see. I want to see science unlock the brain, the organ at the root of this issue. A true challenge, figure out how to rewire the brain around the neural pathways of D.S. Of all the organs in our body, the brain is the most complex, the hardest to understand, the organ that is incredibly difficult to repair and is so very easily damaged. We understand a great deal about our bodies, much more than we did even fifty years ago. Who knows, in another fifty years, perhaps science will access the huge percentage of our brains we don't use, find a way to cure autism and D.S. in adults. We have ways to give sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, is it so big a leap to heal the brain? I, for one, would fully support that research. Need stem cells? Do it. If parents feel their only options are to abort a fetus or subject themselves to a lifetime of assholes, then I feel we have shoved science in the wrong direction. And we have seriously gone off the rail of what we should be as a society.

My son and I have difficult days. We are currently trying to potty train him, a task filled with many tears and frustration. My son constantly babbles, and it is hard to get him to string three words together. He still needs help dressing some days, and often doesn't listen. I feel like I lose my temper and yell at him too much. But...
He loves to sing, he gives these full body hugs, tucking his head against my neck, and sweet little pecking kisses on my lips. He still comes to me for comfort when he hurts himself, and loves to be read to. He has memorized several of his favorites and tries so hard to read along. Yes we have our difficult days, but if I had the choice to go back, I would still pick him every time.